I have imposed a new requirement today limiting who can start and receive private conversations. This is in an effort to thwart scammers who have a zero post count but private message others offering to sell their licenses. The restriction is not strict, a user must post at least one (1) post in the forum before being allowed to start and/or receive private conversations.
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Official vBulletin 5.2.1 Release Candidate 1 is available for download

We're pleased to announce the release of vBulletin 5.2.1 Beta 1. Over 100 issues have been resolved in vBulletin 5.2.1 Beta 1. There are some pretty significant changes with this release.

Warning: It is recommended that this version of vBulletin should not be deployed on Production Servers at this time. Do so at your own risk.

PHP 7 Support
vBulletin 5.2.1 has been updated to work with PHP 7. PHP 7 brings significant performance and other enhancements to the PHP platform. If you encounter any PHP compatibility errors, please post them here:http://tracker.vbulletin.com/secure/...91&issuetype=1

jQuery Update
vBulletin 5.2.1 includes jQuery 2.1.4. This brings a number of enhancements to the jQuery library including performance enhancements. Due to this change, we are no longer able to support IE8. If you're on a version of Windows that cannot upgrade to IE10 or IE11, we suggest that you switch to Firefox or Chrome. If you are using a modern browser and experience any JavaScript compatibility errors or general bugs, please post them here: http://tracker.vbulletin.com/secure/...91&issuetype=1

Please note, this change may cause problems with any third-party or custom modifications that you have made, including Ad Modules. As such, please review all aftermarket JavaScript to make sure that it continues working or is appropriately updated.

Password Resets
The password reset functionality has been streamlined. This will allow a better user experience and reduce the amount of emails sent by the system. In the new system, only a single email will be sent on an email change request. This will contain an embedded password. When the user clicks the link, they will just have to enter and confirm their new password. In order to prevent passwords from being guessed by unsavory users, new random passwords will be generated that are more secure. This will protect the customer. There is also brute force prevention on the request. A user can only request a limited number of resets before they are locked out for a short period of time.

Random Number Generation
We are now relying on a cryptographically secure number generator where appropriate. One example would be the password reset above. This functionality is built into PHP7. If you are using a version of PHP before 7.0, then this will require that your server has a library installed to handle this. If there is no support for at least one of the libraries below, you will not be able to install or upgrade to vBulletin 5.2.1 until one is made available.

Database Cleanup
If you upgraded from an older version of vBulletin, there are a number of tables that are considered deprecated and are no longer used in vBulletin 5 Connect. These tables may contain a considerable amount of data and increase the size of your database storage. In order to streamline this, we are working to remove these unused tables. The tables removed in this version are:

pm

pmreceipt

pmtext

pmthrottle

nodevote

searchcore

searchcore_text

searchgroup

searchgroup_text

visitormessage

visitormessage_hash

Once these tables are deleted, the information will be gone forever. We suggest you make a backup of them if you feel you might need the data in the future for some other application.
Discussion
You may discuss this release here: http://www.vbulletin.com/forum/node/4338832